Mirror Politics: ‘Fire’, Hindutva critique of patriarchy that a film like ‘Fire’

provides, and the characterisation of the

and Indian Culture
Mary E John
Tejaswini Niranjana
With the immediate danger of a possible ban now behind us, it may
be useful to look at ‘Fire’ more carefully and raise certain questions
in the context of the recent controversy and acclaim. Shouldn’t we go
beyond identifying good and bad images of women to investigate the
critique of patriarchy that a film like ‘Fire’ provides, and the
characterisation of the feminist self that it makes available?
THE film ‘Fire’, directed by the Canada
based film-maker Deepa Mehta, made a
relatively unobtrusive entry into India a
few years ago after its initial release in the
west and other parts of the world: It was
shown on video by a number of women’s
groups and at film festivals, and received
mixed reviews in the Indian press, the
international awards notwithstanding. Last
year the film was cleared by the censor
board for commercial screening, and, to
the pleasant surprise of many, without any
cuts. Indeed, ‘censorship’ took the unusual
but significant turn of demanding solely
a change of names – ‘Sita’, the younger
sister-in-law, was to be renamed ‘Nita’.
A few weeks after its opening across the
country, the film hit the headlines with
accounts of attacks by Shiv Sainiks who
targeted the cinema halls in Mumbai and
Delhi where ‘Fire’ was being viewed. In
Mumbai the Shiv Sena action was fuelled
by reports of a special screening for women
only. In Delhi, the reasons cited by Shiv
Sena and Mahila Aghadi members for the
film’s offensiveness ranged from its ‘vul-
garity’ and ‘lesbianism’, to the “five-
minute long abuse of an Indian national
(Javed Jaffrey) by a Chinese”. Soon after
these protests and the controversy that
ensued, Bal Thackeray himself publicly
announced that he would have no objec-
tions to the film being re-released on
condition that the names of both the
female protagonists Radha and Sita/Nita
be switched to Shabana and Saira.
As a result of the attacks at the New
Empire and Cinemax theatres in Mumbai
and Delhi’s Regal cinema, ‘Fire’ was
withdrawn from these cities. In the rest of
the country, however, the controversy over
the film had the opposite effect of expand-
ing the number of venues and shows; in
cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore,
tickets were only available in black. Large
public protests condemning the Shiv Sena
action and the withdrawal of the film were
organised in many places, spanning repre-
sentatives from the cinema and the arts as
well as feminist, gay and lesbian organis-
ations. Numerous articles, even editorials,
made their appearance. The opinions and
responses of the director Deepa Mehta
were especially sought after, in print and
on television.
It is worth underscoring the significance
of the overwhelming support for the film
and the broad-based public outcry against
the attacks on it. As feminists who par-
ticipated in the opposition against the film’s
unwarranted withdrawal, both of us were
called upon to discuss the film, amidst the
widespread acclaim that surrounded it.
Women’s organisations – and especially
gay and lesbian groups who played a
leading role in these counter-protests –
raised key issues relating to questions of
‘obscenity’, on the one hand, and gay/
lesbian rights, on the other. On the whole,
however, these issues tended to get def-
lected if not lost in the dominant focus on
the Shiv Sena attacks. Moreover, critiques
of the film itself were muffled in an overall
atmosphere that sought to protect the funda-
mental right of freedom of expression, and
maintain as great a distance as possible
from the agendas of the Hindu right.
Recent news reports tell us that, in spite
of being sent back to the censor board, the
film has been cleared without any changes
whatsoever. In Delhi, Regal cinema is
once again screening the film. This is a
significant achievement. With the im-
mediate danger of a possible ban now
behind us, it may perhaps be useful to look
at ‘Fire’ more carefully, and raise certain
questions in the context of the recent
controversy and acclaim. Does our whole-
hearted opposition to the Shiv Sena pro-
tests require that we celebrate the film?
What are the responsibilities of feminist
film criticism in the current context? Should
not we go beyond identifying good and
bad images of women to investigate the
feminist self that it makes available? In-
deed, we would like to argue that a critique
of the film is necessary in order to advance
our understanding of questions of femi-
nism and sexuality today.
‘Fire’ represents patriarchy as being
founded on the denial of female sexuality.
A whole range of oppressive structures
targeting myriad aspects of women’s lives
become obscured in this narrowing of
critical range, this compulsion to name a
root cause of women’s subordination.
Control of female sexuality is surely one
of the ideological planks on which patri-
archy rests. But by taking this idea liter-
ally, the film imprisons itself in the very
ideology it seeks to fight, its own version
of authentic reality being nothing but a
mirror image of patriarchal discourse.
‘Fire’ ends up arguing that the successful
assertion of sexual choice is not only a
necessary but also a sufficient condition
– indeed, the sole criterion – for the eman-
cipation of women. Thus the patriarchal
ideology of ‘control’ is first reduced to pure
denial – as though such control did not
also involve the production and amplifi-
cation of sexuality – and is later simply
inverted to produce the film’s own vision of
women’s liberation as free sexual ‘choice’.
This reduction of woman to her body
is accompanied by the equation of patri-
archy with Indian culture and tradition,
epitomised by the imprisonment of ‘Radha’
and ‘Sita’ (later changed to Nita) within
the confines of the Hindu joint family. In
a televised interview some years ago,
Deepa Mehta had said that the film was
about the changes in Indian tradition due
to the new openness fostered by global-
isation. Repressed female sexuality thus
emerges yet again as the quintessential
emblem of an oppressive ‘traditional’
culture in need of transformation by outside
forces. The counter-agendas of the Hindu
right – claiming to protect ‘Indian culture’
from the inroads of ‘alien’ sexualities –
are but a mirroring of this prior construc-
tion and staging, whose colonial roots
need no reiteration here.
The attraction and unconventionality of
the film, especially for women, centre in
its depiction of a lesbian relationship. And
yet, Deepa Mehta has repeatedly dis-
avowed any such identification: The film,
she avers, is about loneliness, not les-
bianism. “Lesbianism is just another
aspect of the film. It is probably the last
thing they resort to when they derive a
certain confidence out of the relationship”
(Indian Express interview, December 13,
1998). In another interview, she said that

Economic and Political Weekly March 6-13, 1999 581

lesbianism was ‘only peripheral’ to the
theme of the film. “It is about how to be
compassionate and in fact the film propa-
gates tolerance” (December 5, 1998, PTI
from Matrix). Most interviewers see her
as ‘fighting the lesbian label’ – as she
herself puts it: “If anything, the film’s
about choices. Hindu concepts of toler-
ance, non-judgmentalism, compassion.
The incredible loneliness of being that’s
often the lot of women in India” (Outlook,
November 30, 1998). Are we witnessing
another kind of mirroring here, this time
of hindutva, which claims that Hinduism’s
supreme virtue is, indeed, tolerance?
Taking their cue from Mehta’s attitude,
Madhu Jain and Sheela Raval in India
Today (‘Ire over Fire’, December 21, 1998)
speak about placard-waving lesbians steal-
ing the limelight during the candlelight
protest outside Regal cinema in Delhi. The
“broader issue of freedom of expression
and tolerance had got derailed by the
lesbian debate”, they say. A ‘surprised
Mehta’, according to them, declares: “I
can’t have my film hijacked by any one
organisation. It is not about lesbianism,
it’s about loneliness, about choices” (p 80).
Shabana Azmi, who won an international
award for her portrayal of Radha in the
film, also participated in the print media
discussion of the controversy. According
to her, “love between individuals belong-
ing to the same sex is only one of the issues
raised by ‘Fire’. The larger issue is that
of empathy” [Azmi 1998].
Most film critics, with some important
exceptions, have also failed to engage
with the lesbianism of the film, preferring
to look upon it as incidental. In the film
itself, the narrative is set in motion by the
negative, even traumatic, sexual experi-
ences of the two sisters-in-law in their
respective marital relationships: Radha,
who is infertile, has to contend with a
celibate husband who must also ‘test’ his
celibacy in bed; Nita’s boorish husband
has rough sexual intercourse with her after
their marriage, but spends the rest of his
time with his girl-friend, a Chinese hair-
dresser. Though the younger woman dis-
plays some agency of her own – impul-
sively changing into men’s trousers, light-
ing up a cigarette and putting on dance
music soon after her arrival from a love-
less honeymoon, and kissing her sister-in-
law at an early moment in the film – this
does little to mitigate the overall sense of
these women’s sexual victimisation. Such
negativity therefore feeds the all too
common stereotype that people become
gay when deprived of normal sex. One is
reminded of the media coverage over a
decade ago when two police-women in a
582
small town in Madhya Pradesh decided to
get married. Elaborate accounts of these
women’s personal histories were produced
to show how it was their suffering at the
hands of a cruel society that drove them
to such a decision; little allowance was
made for the possibility of an affirmative
sexual relationship. Both in this story and
in ‘Fire’, the women are depicted as re-
lating to each other only due to the non-
availability of men.
It is one thing for a particular film to
suffer from a reductive view of how
patriarchy operates. But it is quite another
when feminist critics effectively repro-
duce the problems inherent in the film on
an even larger scale. Carol Upadhya’s
remarkable commentary on ‘Fire’ (EPW,
December 12-18, 1998) does this through
a form of argumentation that also proceeds
via a series of mirrors: Indian culture is
nothing but the male control over female
sexuality, a belief held by the Hindu right,
but also by our NRIs and the educated
middle classes more generally. Stray con-
versations initiated by strangers on trains
about the sexual permissiveness of the
west are presented by Upadhya as ultimate
proof of this essential core of Indian tra-
dition. In Upadhya’s view the women’s
movement in the west has successfully
linked the struggle for gender equality
with sexual freedom. However, Indian
feminists, she argues, have been silent on
the issue, and urgently need to launch a
counter-attack by taking their cue from
‘Fire’. This silence is all the more culpable
because control over female sexuality, says
Upadhya, is at the centre of all the other
issues – of violence, family, caste and class
– which Indian feminists had thought more
pressing. The essay concludes by calling
for a direct attack at the “root of both patri-
archy and caste/class hierarchy” through
the demand that “control over one’s sexual
and reproductive life, including free choice
of sexual partner of either sex” be a fun-
damental right protected by law.
One is hard put to know where to begin
in untangling the series of assumptions
and conflations being made in this com-
mentary. Are we being asked to believe
that patriarchy and gender oppression have
a single root cause located in the lack of
personal sexual choice? When the
women’s movement first coined the slo-
gan ‘the personal is the political’ the point
was surely not to reduce the political to
an unproblematic notion of the personal
in which ‘only the personal is political’.
Indeed, the sharpest feminist critiques were
those that interrogated the ideological
construction of free choice, the compul-
sory institutions of heterosexuality, the
Economic and Political Weekly
sexual politics of visual pleasure, the
patriarchal structures of the law, and so
on. By Upadhya’s logic, since most
westerners “accept the idea that everyone
has a right to define and control his or her
sexuality and to choose their own relation-
ships” (p 3177), patriarchy and domina-
tion should have vanished in the west, but
for the presence of the Christian right.
This is not the place to provide an account
of the ways in which sexuality has been
a subject of activism and inquiry in the
Indian women’s movement and elsewhere.
We have come to question the very notion
of a conspiracy of ‘silence’ on our part.1
Moreover, the idea that the west has
successfully addressed and resolved is-
sues of sexuality, while we remain mired
in our repressions and misplaced priori-
ties, is not just patronising, but open to
considerable doubt.2 This way of posing
the problem takes us nowhere because it
reproduces exactly the same play of mir-
rors in which the Hindu right is trapped.
(A little over two years ago, women from
the Hindu right attacked the Miss World
contest in Bangalore for its encourage-
ment of ‘alien’ western sexual norms. Why
did not we go all out to defend and cele-
brate the beauty pageant’s liberatory
potential for us all?)3 No one would deny
that as a subject of scholarship, the field
of sexuality in India is a relatively new
one and still largely uncharted. But pre-
cisely for this reason it is conceptually and
politically hazardous to jump to the most
far-reaching conclusions on this theme.
A film like ‘Fire’, which draws on the
aesthetic/political space of the alternative
‘art’ film, raises corresponding expecta-
tions regarding its feminist politics. We
have already remarked on how women’s
oppression is seen to be exclusively an-
chored in the denial of female sexuality.
All the characters in the film are actively
sexualised in various ways, with the
possible exception of the old widowed
mother, bedridden and unable to speak.
The prisoner of a paralytic body, she can
only react helplessly, but with anger and
disgust, at the displays of sexuality she has
to see and hear. Otherwise, female agency
is overwhelmingly translated in sexual
terms. In a marginal figure like the Indian-
Chinese girl-friend of the younger brother,
agency takes the form of refusal – refusal
to marry into and be suffocated by the joint
family system. Subsequently we hear of
her decision to leave India for a better life
in Hongkong, suggesting that her sexual
independence has no future here, not even
in the heart of the capital, but requires the
more liberated space of an east Asian
modernity. (It is her father who berates
March 6-13, 1999
Javed Jaffrey about conditions in India,
including its racism.)
As the relationship of the two sisters-
in-law evolves, so too do their confron-
tations with their husbands, which is how
the central narrative is propelled to its
ultimate climax. The dramatic conclusion
of the film shows Radha joining Nita in
pouring rain at the Nizamuddin dargah
after her ‘ordeal by fire’. Simultaneously
evoking ‘sati’ and ‘Sita’, but also dowry
deaths, ‘fire’ has evolved into a powerful
western stereotype of the Indian woman’s
annihilation by Hindu religion and cul-
ture.4 Here, ‘fire’ symbolises the purity
and goodness of the space of the couple,
which is thus contrasted to that of the joint
family, as though patriarchy lodges solely
in the latter, and not in contemporary
society at large, both public as well as
private, ‘traditional’ as well as ‘modern’.
But this is not the only way in which
the agency of the women is structured by
the film. In a significant scene, Radha
discovers the servant of the house mas-
turbating in front of a porn film (secretly
procured from the family video shop).
Radha’s horror and disgust more than
matches that of the mother-in-law; she
demands that he leave the house, in spite
of his pleas, and in spite of his threats to
tell the family what he knows about her
and Nita. Thus, in the film’s own repre-
sentational practices, sexual freedom takes
the form of affirming the right of the two
women to ‘express’ their sexuality, to leave
the household to build a new life for
themselves, but the affirmation is made
against the vilified sexuality of the ser-
vant, whose actions result in his being cast
out by Radha herself. In other words, we
are shown the emergence of the feminist
self being enabled in part by the rejection
of other claims to sexual expression. The
contrasts are stark: the women are treated
with high seriousness, the male servant
provides comic relief. The lighting and
camera angles play up the women’s beauty
and satirise the servant as misshapen. The
expressive and emergent feminist self
becomes thus coded in the film as upper
caste and middle class, defined against
subjectivities that are neither.
The class-caste prejudices of the film
are frequently echoed, albeit in a different
mode, in the language of those protesting
the protests against ‘Fire’. Women’s rights
were commonly defended against the
‘lumpen’ and ‘lunatic’ vandalism of the
Shiv Sainiks. Women Shiv Sainiks, mem-
bers of the Mahila Aghadi, who led the
charge in Mumbai were variously depicted
as pawns, a “willing vehicle for diversion-
ary violence” by male Shiv Sainiks, but
Economic and Political Weekly March 6-13, 1999
also as ‘mean’ and ‘phantasmagorial’,
stupid and ignorant (‘The wrong end of
the telescope’, The Times of India, De-
cember 6, 1998). Over and over again,
these protesters were condemned for their
lack of decorum, a charge which has also
been levelled in the past against women’s
groups, dalit protesters and left activists.
Practically everyone, including the BJP,
has sought to distance themselves from
the attacks on the film, making it clear that
‘civil society’ will not permit modes of
protest which are not endorsed by norms
of parliamentary democracy. Our com-
ment should not be read in any way as a
gesture of support for women Shiv Sainiks’
attacks on ‘Fire’; all we want to do is draw
attention to how we affirm the idea of
women’s ‘liberation’ in opposition to the
repressed ‘Bharatiya Nari’ whose ‘violent
sublimation’ is manifested in going
‘berserk’. Rethinking these simple oppo-
sitions may help us interrogate those ideas
of liberation which have entered feminist
common sense and thus become exempt
from critical scrutiny.
The counter-protests – particularly those
by lesbian and gay groups – have helped
to foreground two critical issues, both of
which have been unsatisfactorily addressed
in the women’s movement so far. The first
is the question of ‘obscenity’, which dates
back to the 1970s, when women’s groups
across the country blackened film hoard-
ings with explicitly sexualised images of
women. We have come a long way from
the days when depictions of sex and
violence were automatically clubbed to-
gether as a common problem for the
movement. However, the dominant femi-
nist attitudes towards the so-called ‘objecti-
fication’ of women in the media have not
really changed significantly. In fact, these
attitudes are currently undergoing a revival
amidst widespread panic over the per-
ceived proliferation of visual sexual im-
ages under globalisation. During the ‘Fire’
controversy, many feminists were, per-
haps for the first time, on the ‘other’ side,
joining the ranks of those who sought to
criticise the relationship between sexuality,
obscenity and censorship. Does this indi-
cate, then, that a questioning of hitherto
well-entrenched positions is under way?
It is as yet unclear whether such a
conclusion is justified, especially in light
of the visual politics of the film itself on
the very question of obscenity. ‘Fire’
actively promotes the othering of porno-
graphy by suggesting that pornography’s
primary function is to corrupt. The poten-
tial objects of such ‘corruption’ range from
non-middle class men like the servant to
the bodies and minds of children (one
scene focuses on young schoolboys eager
to check out blue films at the video shop).
Through these self-reflexive gestures,
‘Fire’ effectively elevates itself onto an
aesthetic level of distinction unsullied by
the immorality and indecency associated
with pornographic sex.
Some commentators have tried to under-
mine the Shiv Sainiks’ claims of protecting
Indian culture from immorality, by provid-
ing long lists of all the “obviously prurient
and semi-pornographic films” in Delhi
which the Sena members left untouched
during the attacks on ‘Fire’ [Bidwai 1998:9].
One suspects, therefore, that a wholly
different category is being employed in
the dominant discussions of ‘Fire’: The
freedom of expression of ‘Fire’ cannot be
censored because it is not obscene: rather,
it is ‘art’, unlike pornography, beauty
contests, or commercial Hindi cinema.
It is not accidental that the very sections
of the women’s movement most out-
spoken against obscenity have also tended
to view sexuality primarily as a gay and
lesbian problem. As lesbian feminists have
had to point out repeatedly, such an un-
derstanding not only naturalises hetero-
sexuality as institution and ‘choice’, but
completely fails to recognise the multiple
structures of heterosexual privilege which
have marginalised homosexuality in the
first place. Whatever subversive potential
‘Fire’ might have had (as a film that makes
visible the ‘naturalised’ hegemony of
heterosexuality in contemporary culture,
for example) is nullified by its largely
masculinist assumption that men should
not neglect the sexual needs of their wives,
lest they turn lesbian.
It is particularly disingenuous that most
commentators on the ‘Fire’ controversy
have been writing as though the Hindu
right in general and the Shiv Sena in
particular were the sole proprietors of
patriarchy and sexual intolerance. Only a
few years ago, leftist writers in Andhra
were second to none in their vituperative
attacks on some feminist Telugu poets for
writing allegedly ‘blue’ poetry. In a dif-
ferent vein, during the 16th congress of
the CPI(M) held in Calcutta in October
1998, the general secretary of the All India
Democratic Women’s Association
(AIDWA) publicly and dramatically with-
drew her membership from the central
committee in order to draw attention to
the resilient patriarchal structures of the
party, which has no women activists
represented in any of its higher bodies.5
We may have some justification in
scoffing at the Mahila Aghadi for believ-
ing, for instance, that lesbianism would
lead to the end of reproduction and future
583
population growth. The occasional com-
mentary provides bits of information about
an authentic Indian tradition of lesbianism
as further proof of ‘their’ ignorance about
‘our’ culture. But how well-informed are
‘we’ really, or Deepa Mehta for that matter?
If the last decade has witnessed greater
visibility around gay and lesbian issues,
this is overwhelmingly due to the efforts
of gays and lesbians who have received
too little public support from the women’s
movement or other democratic organi-
sations. Heterosexual feminists in India
show few signs of being aware of the costs
and risks lesbians bear on a daily basis,
both in their private and professional lives,
nor of their complex strategies of survival.
Nevertheless, the ‘Fire’ controversy can
justly claim credit for having made les-
bianism publicly visible, even acceptable.
The term is now frequently heard in the
media, and continues to be a common
subject in conversations. School children
in Delhi, we have been told, refer to ‘Fire’
as a film about ‘shaadi between women’.
At a women’s studies refresher course for
college teachers held at Jadavpur Univer-
sity in Calcutta during the height of the
controversy, participants demanded that
homosexuality be debated at an early point
in the course. Many gays and lesbians
across India are producing readings of ‘Fire’
that foreground the issue of same-sex relation-
ships. A broad-based ‘Campaign for
Lesbian Rights’ has been formed in Delhi
in the wake of the controversy to build aware-
ness that “discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation/preference is a violation
of basic human rights”, and to counter the
widespread misrepresentation of lesbian
lives in the media and society. ‘Fire’ has
thus become a rallying point for gay people
who see it as an occasion to reiterate their
commitment to the public discussion of
sexuality and sexual preference.
Such is the democratising potential of
the commercial circuits of the cinema in
India that the controversy around ‘Fire’
has been able to feed into the public sphere
and create spaces for hitherto marginalised
struggles that go much beyond the prob-
lematic politics of the film itself. We have
argued, however, that attention must be
paid to the film’s specific framing of
questions of women and sexuality be-
cause of the impact such framing is likely
to have on feminist politics, and more
generally on popular notions of feminism.
We suggested that ‘Fire’s’ unreflective
class-caste assumptions help characterise
the feminist self as one carrying certain
markers of privilege even as it claims a
form of victimhood. We also pointed out
that ‘Fire’s’ representation of the relation-
584
ship between patriarchy and female sexu-
ality mirrored the former’s reductive
biologism. The task that lies ahead for the
women’s movement would involve, it
seems to us, not only a refusal of the
normalisation of the heterosexual self but
also a dismantling of the feminist self’s
hidden caste-class and community mark-
ers. In this task we need to shape a politics
that does not lapse into the mirror-play
retailed by the film, the Hindu Right, and
some liberal/left initiatives.
Notes
[We would like to acknowledge the use of the
Fire dossier at the Centre for the Study of Culture
and Society, Bangalore, and the media file at the
Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New
Delhi.]
1 To take but a few examples from within
scholarship in India, see Uberoi (1996), Thapan
(1997) and John and Nair (1998).
2 The western literature on the subject might be
vast; but this hardly implies that questions of
sexuality have been resolved. For different
accounts – sympathetic but critical – of the
feminist debates or ‘sex-wars’ of the 1980s,
see Rubin (1984), Rich (1986) and King (1990).
Gayle Rubin’s essay is particularly noteworthy
for its sense of disappointment, if not betrayal
by the exclusionary sexual politics of other
feminists.
3 The Bangalore contest was attacked by both
left and right groups, including AIDWA/CPM,
NFIW/CPI, KRRS, and the BJP. For a fuller
discussion of the limitations in the political
vocabulary employed by the protestors against
the beauty pageant, see John (1998) and
Niranjana (1999).
4 For a fuller elaboration of this stereotype in
the context of the United States, see Uma
Narayan’s discussion ‘Cross-Cultural Con-
nections, Border-Crossings and “Death by
Culture” ‘ in Narayan (1997).
5 In its 10-page coverage of the CPI(M) congress,
Economic and Political Weekly
even as reputed a journal as Frontline
(November 6, 1998), which frequently takes
up the cause of gender justice, found itself
unable to do more than ‘mention’ the issue
raised by the AIDWA general secretary. It is
ironic that right wing political leaders like
Uma Bharati have been much more
forthcoming in the media about the problems
faced by single women in the BJP.
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